Some clients overlook this quite often, and most don't buy in to focusing on fixing their page load time. This should certainly be on the top of the list of things to do. Not only from an SEO perspective, from a pure user experience of losing potential business because you can't add to cart or you're submit buttons hangs because of all the JS it's calling.

It's such a waste of time to participate in negative SEO. Success takes a long steady time to build. If you're impatient and want to take shortcuts, get out of the game period. You can't sustain quick wins in any facet of life. SEO is an animal of epic Google proportions and for certain you'll be sniffed out eventually.

Joel, I totally agree with you. Who does SEO matter most to? SEO professionals. The average Joe surfer has no clue what goes into SEO. Google is looking out for Google, not for us. They are a business and are looking out for their best interest. With all the data they've collected, they know more than we ever will.

They have reason behind their rhyme and this is being done on purpose. If Google gets heavily into the App world, Search will slowly die as Apps are now a search portal.

I'm seeing the same things too for a client of mine. Newcomers outranking established legitimate sites. Doing back link analysis on one site showed thousands of spammy sites. Hopefully, and this is just positive thinking, is that Google's Caffeine is a Trojan Horse of sorts that somehow brought the spam to the top to better identify and filter them out eventually. Who knows though.